Minimally invasive surgery is increasingly popular with management in the drive to reduce hospital expenditure and especially the expense of patients' stay overnight in hospital after surgical procedures. Moreover, our patients can benefit enormously through reduced disturbance of their well-being and less interference with metabolic and other physiological processes. It has been made possible by amazing developments in surgical techniques such that conventional surgery for many procedures as we used to know them hardly exists today. Historically, advances in surgery were made possible through advances in anaesthesia; however, to some extent, at least, the boot is on the other foot because these advances in surgery through minimally invasive (so-called keyhole) techniques have demanded the refinement and development of existing anaesthetic techniques and the introduction of new drugs. Notably, these methods require keeping the patient safe at all times and returning the patient to full consciousness extremely rapidly, yet with freedom from pain, immediately the surgical procedure is completed.

Prof. Tom Crozier, with long-standing experience of this subject, writes from Göttingen – arguably the foremost centre of excellence of anaesthesia in Europe. Readers will note that, first and foremost, this is an essentially practical book. He defines the subject in terms of practicalities such that some often overlooked aspects, for example surgery of the upper aerodigestive tract, are included. This is eminently sensible in a book of this kind. In the early days of minimally invasive surgery some terrible disasters – unnoticed perforated bowel, massive haemorrhage from damaged vessels, gas embolism, etc. – befell some patients.